6. Kiera
Kiera
T he three of them talked for about twenty minutes and Kiera was happy to see how easily Hunter made conversation with Nana.
In addition to her knowledge of the Old West, she could hold her own in a discussion of Jane Austen – Nana’s favorite author - and that was a detail that surprised Kiera.
When she shot Hunter an inquiring glance, she just shrugged and said, “High school reading assignment.”
Kiera knew better than to judge a book by its cover, but she hadn’t pegged Hunter for the literary type.
Maybe it was the flannel, or the effortlessly messy, dusty blonde hair that gave her a sort of female James Dean look, the kind that said reading assignments were optional, or maybe that she just didn’t have time for them.
Kiera was happy to be wrong about that impression.
She was just observing to herself that Hunter happened to be the polar opposite of Lauren when the grandfather clock in the hallway began to chime and Kiera checked the time on her phone. It was ten a.m. already and Kiera had her next class soon.
She cut into a conversation about Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship in Pride and Prejudice , saying, “I’m sorry, but I have to get back to campus for class. Hunter, do you want a ride?”
“Oh, okay,” she said, shaking Nana’s hand again before following Kiera into the foyer. Then she asked, lowering her voice so Nana wouldn’t hear them talking about her, “Will she be alright by herself?”
“My mother will come by to check on her in an hour or two when she’s done with her client appointment,” Kiera said. “It’s not ideal but we’ve been doing what we can by ourselves.”
“I understand,” Hunter said, then hesitantly, she offered, “I could stay. I mean, if you and Abby want me to.”
“Are you sure?” Kiera asked. “I thought you just got off a night shift.”
“I did,” Hunter said. “But I’m caffeinated and I’ll be fine for a couple of hours. You’ll be back by two, right?”
“More like six today,” Kiera said apologetically. “I’m scheduled for a shift at the teen center this afternoon. It’s okay. I’m sure Nana will be alright and we can start some other day.”
“I can stay,” Hunter insisted. “My sister’s working an early shift at the café today, which means she’ll be free to meet the boys when they get off the bus. I don’t like the idea of leaving Abby alone right after you’ve entrusted me with her safety… and I’ll be honest, we really need the money.”
“Are you sure?”
“I did get the job, right?” Hunter asked. She looked like she was afraid to be optimistic.
“I think she really likes you,” Kiera said, then cracked a smile. “You’re going to have to brush up on your Jane Austen because she’ll talk your ear off about that. You’re sure it’s not a problem to stay?”
“Not at all,” Hunter promised.
“Okay,” Kiera said, holding out her hand. “Then you’re hired.”
Hunter took her hand with a big smile and then they both went back into the dining room to let Nana know that Hunter would be keeping her company this morning.
“I’d love to help you organize your recipe cards,” Hunter offered.
Nana hadn’t been crazy about the idea of hiring a nurse when Kiera first brought it up, but she liked Hunter and deep down, Kiera knew that she understood the need for help. She accepted Hunter’s offer to help and gestured to a chair beside her.
While Hunter walked around the large table to join her, Kiera said, “I’ll be back about six o’clock. Hunter, please help yourself to anything you need and just ask Nana if you have any questions. Oh, and here’s my phone number in case anything comes up.”
She reached across the table and found a page that had been torn out of a magazine about a hundred years ago. It had some sort of jello mold recipe on it and she wrote her phone number at the bottom, then slid it across the table to Hunter.
“Okay, I guess I’ll go to class now,” she said with a smile. She had a sudden urge to spend the rest of the morning bonding over ancient recipe cards – it seemed like a good time – but her grant writing class wouldn’t wait.
“Have a good day, dear,” Nana said, waving to her.
“Bye,” Hunter said, also waving in a slightly cheeky manner.
Kiera smirked at this, then headed for the door. She was having a hard time wiping the smile from her lips. Before she left, Kiera heard Nana saying to Hunter, “How’d you like to be my scribe? There’s a laptop in the office across the hall – I’ll read the recipes and you type them up.”
Kiera felt conflicted as she drove back to the university. On one hand, she couldn’t believe her luck to have met someone who was such a good match for Nana, and on the other hand, it made her grandmother’s diagnosis more real.
In the beginning, it was easy to pretend that Nana was simply suffering from age-related forgetfulness.
When she started getting confused, calling Kiera by her mother’s name, and had trouble remembering simple words, Kiera was forced to confront the reality of her grandmother’s mortality and her vulnerability.
And now that she had an in-home care nurse, it was like announcing that she could no longer be trusted to care for herself.
Kiera wasn’t sure she was ready for that stage of Nana’s condition, but if it was time then at least Hunter seemed like a good person to guide Nana through it. Kiera had liked her immediately, and it seemed like Nana did, too.
Kiera realized after her grant writing class was over that she hadn’t gotten Hunter’s phone number, so she called the house phone to ask Nana how everything was going.
“Great,” she said. “We’re getting along famously and Hunter’s helping me organize my recipe cards by category before we type them up.”
Kiera asked to talk to Hunter, too, to make sure that everything was going well on her end, then she headed to her next class.
It was World History – a general education credit that she’d been putting off because memorizing dates was not her strong suit.
There were two other Kappas in that class, both sophomores, and Kiera noticed them glancing her way a few times throughout the lecture.
Probably wondering whether I’ll ever have the nerve to show up at the Kappa house again, Kiera thought. It was a question she’d been asking herself as well, and at least right now, the answer was a definitive no.
She’d rather hide out at Nana’s house for the rest of the year if it meant she never had to face Lauren and relive all that humiliation and betrayal. It was easier to adopt a policy of avoidance – sort of like it used to be easier to pretend that Nana was just forgetful and not sick.
But if hiring Hunter was what made it impossible to avoid that realization, then Kappa’s charity events were what would finally drag Kiera – kicking and screaming – back to the sorority.
She was the philanthropy chair and if she didn’t spearhead those events, no one would.
There was a fundraiser 5k coming up in about a month, which meant she still had a little more time to bury her head in the sand and pretend nothing ever happened between her and Lauren.
So she ignored the Kappa girls in her class, kept her eyes on her notebook, and scribbled notes about Gilgamesh until the lecture was over. Then she quickly pulled on her red cap and dashed out of the room.
Kiera’s final stop for the day was the teen center.
Located in downtown Grimm Falls, it was an old veterans’ hall that had been converted into a place for the city’s latchkey kids to congregate after school and on the weekends.
Kiera had first discovered the center during her freshman year when the Kappas did an afternoon of volunteer work there.
Most of her fellow sorority sisters didn’t think twice about it, but the experience left an impression on Kiera.
She’d always known that her family had money thanks to her grandfather’s rubber industry profits and her father’s law practice.
Kiera went to a private high school, she was fully aware of the unnecessary size of her grandparents’ house, and she understood that most families didn’t have the luxury of ordering from different restaurants every night simply because none of them wanted to spend the evening in a hot kitchen.
But working at the teen center was the first time Kiera truly understood the impact of the silver spoon she’d been born with.
Some of the kids came because they knew an after-school snack would be waiting for them, and because there might not be any dinner at home.
Some of them came to the center because it was that or spend the afternoon alone while their parents worked into the evening.
Some even came because one very real alternative to the center was getting sucked into a criminal lifestyle that was prevalent in their neighborhoods.
And some of them came because the teen center was the only place they knew of where the adults actually cared about them and took the time to listen to them rather than writing them off because of where they lived or how they did in school.
Kiera had been volunteering her time here once a week since freshman year – or more, when she had the time.
She wanted to use the advantages she’d been handed in her youth to improve these kids’ lives, and if her grant proposal was approved, she would turn this into a full-time job after graduation.
She’d have to earn her own salary first, though, and her first goal for today was to check her email and see if the grant foundation had contacted her.